On Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" and actually reading poems
People are mad about a Walt Whitman poem on the internet. The poem is "I Sing the Body Electric". Someone administered a queer games bundle and included the poem, I think just as one of those "queer people have always been here" rhetorical moves. They... should have picked a different poem, but just because it's not really particularly queer, especially for Whitman.
What people are mad about is they are misreading the poem to mean that Whitman is racist and enabling the slave trade. Here's the passage in question:
A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the makings of heroes.
So what the poem is doing is saying the narrator must help the auctioneer because he "does not half know his business" and the way he helps is to rant about how the human body is sacred, the Black just as much as the white, and if people can't understand that they are debasing themselves.
It's literally saying the auctioneer is doing his job badly, and his job is to describe why this body (slave) is good to buy. And it's "good to buy" because it is priceless, "they cannot [bid] high enough for it..." Whitman is taking on the role of auctioneer to give a parodic speech about the quality of the bodies on display -- and the quality is perfect.
Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)
Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred...
When you read a poem, you have to read the entire thing, especially if the poet is playing with form the way Whitman always did.